Michael will be speaking on Monday, October 4 at 4 pm at Morse College at Yale (302 York St.). It’s a Master’s Tea, which means we’ll be gathering in a living-room-like setting, with real tea for those who want it. I organized a tea at Morse in the spring for Rebecca Skloot for her self-made book tour. Here’s an article about it, complete with a photo of the comfortable furniture.

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I like a lot of Specter’s work but I was troubled by parts of Denialism. He seems to conflate anti-science denialism, such as creationism and vaccination denialism, with what I see as more legitimate concerns about the political economy of genetically engineered crops and the unknown consequences of large-scale bioengineering. By lumping together, under the label of”denialists,” those who oppose vaccination (because of personal anecdotes and fearmongering) with those who raise questions about whether it’s a good thing for agribusiness to be able to patent vital food crops and require a license for their use, Specter seems to conflate two very different sets of concerns, the second of which is much more nuanced than the label “denialism” implies. The first involves refusing to accept knowledge, and finding specious reasons to reject it; the other involves the consequences of technological intervention in the world on a large scale. It’s denialist to claim that crops that are genetically engineered to include Bt require fewer chemical pesticides–but is it denialist to claim that the advantages of such genetic engineering are not so clear-cut?